A gentler way

Author: Andrew Nind

  • Simple living

    According to Mark Twain, when he was 16 his father knew nothing, but by the time he was 21, it was amazing how much he had learnt.

    Twain’s father may have been ultimately fortunate. A gloomier perspective on children’s attitudes to their parents was offered by Oscar Wilde: children start off loving their parents; then they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

    George Eliot wrote eloquently – in Silas Marner for example – about the natural suspicion human communities have towards an outsider. Such suspicion may be temporal as well as geographical. Each generation is like a Silas Marner to its successors. They think they know better, are quick to see the earlier one’s mistakes, less quick to see them fairly in context. Maybe that’s part of the reason why it often seems that, in Hegel’s words, the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

    A common perspective is that unless you have a specific experience in life, or a specific physical condition, or live in a specific physical situation, then you cannot properly understand someone else who does have that experience, condition or situation. You can’t understand a country unless you’ve been there. Or a man, woman, trans, or other gender unless you are or have been one. Or addiction to drugs unless you’ve tried them yourself. Or the criminal mind (sorry Father Brown) unless you have a record. Or homelessness unless you’ve been homeless.

    Or a particular time unless you’ve lived through it.

    The popular appeal of this perspective may be attributed in part to the importance we attach to names. Every generation has different names and categories – for flowers, medical conditions, ethnicities, social groupings and even biology. To misuse (the current meanings of) names or categories is to court suspicion or worse. Richard Feynman’s insight that when you learn the name of something in the physical or natural world, you haven’t on that score yet developed any understanding of it, might have been scientifically valuable but is hardly mainstream in human affairs.

    Having had an experience adds to a person’s CV a gravitas that is quite likely to be unwarranted. In one of his books, Alain de Botton comments that often you can communicate in vain with a person who’s just returned from travel abroad for evidence of any insight into the land just visited. Nor will a journalist who’s been to the front line in a conflict necessarily have any new wisdom to impart. But we can be confident that the traveller and journalist will be listened to on account of their experience. If Dickens’ M’Choakumchild had learnt a little less, he could have taught infinitely better so much more; apparently a similar message doesn’t apply to foreign travel.

    The emphasis on specific experience not only makes it hard to learn from the past. It also militates against simple living – and a sustainable way of life. Simple living is seen as simplistic living with a narrow outlook; a sophisticated individual must have a wealth of experiences in life to warrant the adjective. Samuel Johnson might have commented that most of us stand in greater need of being reminded of what we already know than learning or experiencing new things; but, like Feynman, his observation is more wise than popular, both at the time he made it and in the current zeitgeist.

  • Fear of death

    Yesterday’s Financial Times contained an article about slowing demand for diesel, the “lifeblood of the industrial economy”. According to the FT, the “warning signs” and “investor fears” indicate a “looming recession” in the US. For all its professed sympathy for renewable energy and decarbonisation, the FT can’t help thinking that a healthy economy is one that burns a lot of oil.

    We are living in the dark ages as long as a reduction in fossil fuel consumption is represented as a bad thing.

    According to the Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan American think-tank based in Washington, in a study undertaken in September 2021, most people in the US, Canada, the UK and European countries say they are willing to make “a lot of or some” changes to the way they live and work in order to reduce the global impact of climate change. Great! The most obvious change is to use less oil. So if, as the FT suggests, American demand for diesel is lower, isn’t that a cause for celebration rather than concern?

    Alas, it seems unlikely that we’re witnessing voluntary demand-side efforts to reduce carbon emissions on a large scale. When push comes to shove, most of us are very reluctant to address our fossil fuel addiction – our addiction, that is, to travelling lots of miles and buying lots of stuff. This is partly because we don’t like change or find it easy. But I wonder whether there’s a deeper cause than mere habit, or short-term necessity, to explain our insatiable appetite for energy and resources.

    Fear of death?

    In one of his travelogues, the presenter Simon Reeve follows the river Ganges to the Indian city of Varanasi, where people go to die. According to Hindu tradition, to die in Varanasi is to be released from the entrapment of reincarnation. Reeve opens up by saying that he frequently wakes in the middle of the night in cold sweats at the prospect of his own end.

    Maybe I’m showing my ignorance, but I can bring to mind very few instances from books that I’ve read, or programmes that I’ve watched, where the fear of death is so explicitly acknowledged as a part of everyday life. It is likely to be mentioned when people are in mortal danger, due to frailty or illness, or a dangerous adventure, or conflict situation; but it is hardly ever admitted to in normal circumstances when people are fit and unthreatened. Apart from Reeve’s admission, I can only think of one other: in a book by Alain de Botton where he claims that we live in a constant state of mortal terror.

    Especially, perhaps, because it goes unacknowledged, the fear of death fuels our restlessness, our urge to travel, and our acquisitiveness. Maybe if we could recognize it, talk about it, even bring it into our education system, we could learn to live with it more easily, and discover and foster a Zen-like capacity for stillness in ourselves.

    Not that psychological stillness is synonymous with sitting still all the time. Some of us at least could do with being more physically active, not less … but in ways that don’t involve cars, planes, demolishing and rebuilding, or acquiring lots of stuff. Being alive doesn’t need to be confounded with excessive consumption of energy and resources.

    Fear of death may also indirectly affect our attitudes to food and diet. To many of us, whilst we might not have articulated it as such, being strong and virile – robustly resilient to death – means eating plenty of meat. I was reminded of this a week ago when an elderly member of the family reported that the canteen at an old people’s home was largely meat-based: “man’s food”, she called it.

    Our food and our energy. In each case, the unacknowledged fear of death warps our judgement – so we don’t notice the unbalanced (and unsustainable) relationship we have with them. So we devote ever more – now nearly half – of the planet’s entire land surface to livestock farming; and we continue to correlate diesel consumption with a “healthy” economy.